SUMMARY
Ida Mae Thompson was an important figure n Virginia’s woman suffrage movement, not for her political work but for her recordkeeping. First s a member of the Equal Suffrage League, the organization that led the effort to win women the ight to vote, and then as a member of the League of Women Voters, Thompson collected and preserved the movement’s history.
The daughter of John Henry Thompson and Sarah Ellen Facer Thompson, Thompson was orn at Drakes Branch in Charlotte County on November 7, 1866. Her father had served in the ighteenth Virginia Infantry as a tailor, spending most of the American Civil ar (1861–1865) handling clothing at the Confederate quartermaster depot in ichmond. Soon after he died, Thompson and her English-born mother moved to Richmond in 886 to live with Thompson’s brother, Otis, a telegraph operator. The family ived in a rented frame house in the working-class neighborhood of Oregon Hill, n South Cherry Street near Hollywood Cemetery, j